Extremely impressive bagel manipulation

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These Dodgers limited giveaways seem like such a nightmare

@yukiohyea POV: You thought getting the Dodgers Luffy card would be easy… 😅 #OnePiece #Dodgers #TradingCardMadness ♬ som original - luJiZo

@asukitty__ #NAMI - at the dodgers game and if u have an extra hat and you are generous pls hmu now #namionepiece #dodgers #dodgersgame #onepiecedodgers #namionepiececosplay #onepiece #onepiececosplay #cosplay #namicosplay #namionepieceedit #namionepiece🍊 #🍊#luffyhat #luffy #dodgersstadium #viral #fypシ #fyp #viralvideo #foryoupage #foryou #ohtani #shoheiohtani #baseball #onepiecebaseball ♬ We Are! - Hiroshi Kitadani

@jl3rd One piece night at dodger stadium, a sea of Hats 😂 #onepiece #dodgers #promo #fyp ♬ original sound - mrclipcity

Speaking of nightmares, air traffic controllers went on strike in France:

@cherylcookubiird I genuinely may lose it I'm currently stuck on this train #fypシ #eurosummer #travel #france ♬ original sound - ᶻ 𝗓 𐰁 Kendel 🧸ྀི

@kenziderry And the airlines are on strike ✨ classic✨ #garedunord #travel #eurosummer ♬ Jet2 Advert - ✈️A7-BBH | MAN 🇬🇧

Report alleges that 21,000 workers have died in eight years working on "Saudi vision 2030"

Two summaries of the allegations.

A member of Canada's soccer support team is believed to have used a drone to spy on the New Zealand soccer practice

Athletic:

A drone was flown over a Ferns training session in Saint-Étienne, France, on Monday, New Zealand’s Olympic Committee (NZOC) said in a statement Tuesday. Ferns staffers reported the drone to police, who detained the operator

...

The COC apologized to New Zealand’s players, federation and the Olympic Committee, saying it was “shocked and disappointed.”

"An average of six drones a day are being intercepted" near Olympics sites.

(Speaking of the Olympics, dancers scheduled to participate in the opening ceremony might strike)

MLB baseball players took steps to try replace the union's deputy executive director tonight

ESPN:

The move by players came amid an offseason that has seen a billion-dollar decrease in spending by major league teams and the extended free agency of World Series standout Jordan Montgomery and reigning National League Cy Young Award winner Blake Snell

...

More than one-third of the $2.9 billion in free-agent spending this winter went to two players: a record $700 million for Shohei Ohtani -- $680 million of which is deferred for a decade -- and $325 million for Yoshinobu Yamamoto, both with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Two historic financial behemoths, the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, committed less than $50 million to free agents. Eight teams -- the Oakland, Baltimore, Washington, Tampa Bay, Minnesota, Miami, Cleveland and Colorado -- guaranteed less than $15 million.

Gavin Newsom's office says Panera Bread is not exempt from the new law regarding minimum wage for fast food workers

AP:

[The governor's spokesperson] said to be exempt from the minimum wage law as a bakery, restaurants must produce bread for sale on site. The Governor’s Office said many chain bakeries, such as Panera Bread, mix dough at a centralized off-site location and then ship that dough to the restaurant for baking and sale.

...

[A Panera Bread franchisee who owns 24 Paneras in California] says its likely his restaurants will have to raise wages either way.

“Such a narrow exemption has very little practical value.

Striking doctors in South Kora have been threatened with arrest if they don't return to work

"doctors are struggling to convince the public that more doctors would be a bad thing and have garnered little sympathy"

MLS started using replacement referees tonight after the union rejected a contract offer

Here’s my full report on today’s @PSRAOfficials protest, including interviews with four referees who were there.

“Treat us like the quality athletes that we are, just like everybody else,” veteran center ref Guido Gonzales Jr. said:https://t.co/pt5LT9cN38 via @PhillyInquirer pic.twitter.com/299Yl3fJpx

— Jonathan Tannenwald (@thegoalkeeper) February 22, 2024

“I probably could go work at McDonald’s and have a much less stressful life and make more money.”

Fox's write-up leads with this quote from the commissioner:

"I don't know how you get to a point where there's a work stoppage and not know what it is that you're disagreeing about. That's frustrating. I imagine it's frustrating for fans. It's certainly frustrating for us, but we'll see how it plays out.

My favorite writing this week is this story about being a modern umarell in Phildelphia

Kelsey McKinney tells a mystery for Defector. (No small excerpt will do it justice)

A full life is made up of such small things!

Speaking of, look at the figurine this shop sells: 

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Federal labor regulators are demanding Starbucks reopen 17 locations closed allegedly to suppress union organizing

LAT (six stores are in Los Angeles):

The NLRB said Starbucks should reopen the 23 stores and reinstate employees who were transferred to other locations, left the company or lost their jobs because of the closures. Employees should also be compensated for lost earnings and benefits, and time they may have spent searching for new jobs.

"Every member of Bandcamp union bargaining team was laid off in huge cuts at Oakland firm"

SFGate:

Songtradr spokesperson Lindsay Nahmiache told SFGATE on Tuesday that the firm didn’t have access to union membership information and that the evaluation of who to lay off included looks at “product groups, job functions, employee tenure, performance evaluations, the importance of roles for smooth business operations, and whether a similar function already existed at Songtradr.”

The Writer's Guild had a special RPG-themed picket

Oh hey look, @daphnemwrites made a super helpful graphic with our whole schedule in one place!! So for you TL;DR people who don't like threads, here's what we're planning! pic.twitter.com/zF6yc6I6qc

— Lindsey Allen (@linzraeallen) August 29, 2023

Here's a write-up and photo gallery.

On day 121 of our strike we got our biggest crowd ever at Universal and this picket raised over $5k for the Entertainment Community Fund. I’m so proud. https://t.co/yw1jh17Pid

— Erin Conley (@Erinsk8) September 1, 2023

Local LA politicians say Universal trimmed the trees without appropriate permits

UPDATE:

With cooperation from the Bureau of Street Services, we have found that no tree trimming permits have been issued over the last three years for this location outside Universal Studios.

Also, the City did not issue any tree trimming permits for the latest tree trimmings. https://t.co/8ge7LElRao pic.twitter.com/JChoiNvHhW

— LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia (@lacontroller) July 19, 2023

Regarding the tree trimming at Universal Studios -- after looking into the matter with the Urban Forestry Division (UFD), we found that no permit was issued for any tree trimming at this site. UFD and StreetsLA are investigating whether a citation can be issued.

BSS Statement: pic.twitter.com/3RyJpTO045

— Councilmember Nithya Raman (@cd4losangeles) July 19, 2023

Editor of the LA Review of Books talks about his mom scabbing during the 1981 Writer's Guild strike

Thread starts here. The punchline:

She was out of the business entirely inside five years. The moral? Don’t fuck with the unions, who offer the only protections you’ve got. Don’t scab. Don’t be a fucking rat. The issues now are even more existential than in ‘81, but they were plenty existential even then

— Matthew Specktor (@matthewspecktor) June 24, 2023

BTW, the hot issue in 1981 was compensation "in the key area of original programming made for pay television, video cassettes and video disks":

''There will inevitably be a shift from free television to pay television,'' Melville Shavelson, president of the Writers' Guild, said today. ''Today's settlement will accelerate the shift. In addition, the producers told us that, within five years, 50 percent of the movie theaters will be closed.'' 

Starbucks announced it was closing its stores in Ithaca, so students have demanded Cornell stop selling Starbucks drinks on campus

WSKG on the announcement:

Just over a year ago, workers at all three of Ithaca’s Starbucks locations voted to unionize, making it the first city in the country to have all-unionized stores

...

A spokesperson for Starbucks said that the decision to close the stores did not have to do with union membership

Cornell Daily Sun:

In response to the announcement that all Ithaca-based Starbucks locations will be permanently closed by May 26, student organizers and Starbucks employees occupied Day Hall on Thursday, May 11 to urge Cornell to end its relationship with Starbucks.

On both North and Central Campuses, most Cornell dining halls and cafés serve Starbucks brand beverages.

...

Organizers discussed expanding the number of locations offering Gimme! Coffee — which is currently sold at Bill and Melinda Gates Hall

Tony Gilroy announced he will no longer be producing Andor during the writer's strike

Hollywood Reporter:

“I discontinued all writing and writing-related work on Andor prior to midnight, May 1. After being briefed on the Saturday showrunner meeting, I informed [co-chair of the WGA’s negotiating committee] on Sunday morning that I would also be ceasing all non-writing producing functions,” Gilroy said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter. 

...

On Friday afternoon, THR reported that studios including Disney had sent letters to showrunners demanding that they continue their contractually obligated non-writing services amid the strike.  

Today's news and jokes

I mainly remember Conan honoring the strike and doing shit like seeing how long he could spin his wedding ring on his desk, the man was a real one for that https://t.co/dKaPB2sgio

— AK Lingus (@aklingus) May 1, 2023

This is true. Here's Conan spinning his wedding ring during the 2007 writers' strike just to fill airtime. It was like this for months.

NBC was lucky that Conan is the GOAT, but it's impossible to explain to Gen Z how bad the content will get if there's another one. https://t.co/tNkduyiNac pic.twitter.com/5Eo1WqQG0l

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) May 2, 2023

Thinking back to the '88 writers strike when Letterman brought out a toaster on his desk and would throw toast out to the audience.

— Pablo Hidalgo (@pabl0hidalgo) May 1, 2023

(Starting at 34 minutes)

Happy May 1, the real labor day

Wikipedia describes May 1, 1886, the day of the general strike to demand an eight-hour work day:

On Saturday, May 1, thousands of workers who went on strike and attended rallies that were held throughout the United States sang from the anthem, Eight Hour. The chorus of the song reflected the ideology of the Great Upheaval, "Eight Hours for work. Eight hours for rest. Eight hours for what we will." Estimates of the number of striking workers across the U.S. range from 300,000 to half a million.

...

When the end-of-the-workday bell sounded, however, a group of workers surged to the gates to confront the strikebreakers. Despite calls for calm ... the police fired on the crowd.

...

A New York Times article, with the dateline May 4, and headlined "Rioting and Bloodshed in the Streets of Chicago ... Twelve Policemen Dead or Dying", reported that Fielden spoke for 20 minutes, alleging that his words grew "wilder and more violent as he proceeded". Another New York Times article, headlined "Anarchy's Red Hand" and dated May 6, opens with: "The villainous teachings of the Anarchists bore bloody fruit in Chicago tonight and before daylight at least a dozen stalwart men will have laid down their lives as a tribute to the doctrine of Herr Johann Most." It referred to the strikers as a "mob" and used quotation marks around the term "workingmen"

...

A harsh anti-union clampdown followed the Haymarket incident and the Great Upheaval subsided. Employers regained control of their workers and traditional workdays were restored to ten or more hours a day. There was a massive outpouring of community and business support for the police and many thousands of dollars were donated to funds for their medical care and to assist their efforts. The entire labor and immigrant community, particularly Germans and Bohemians, came under suspicion. 

...

The association of May Day with the Haymarket martyrs has remained strong in Mexico. Mary Harris "Mother" Jones was in Mexico on May 1, 1921, and wrote of the "day of 'fiestas'" that marked "the killing of the workers in Chicago for demanding the eight-hour day". In 1929, The New York Times referred to the May Day parade in Mexico City as "the annual demonstration glorifying the memory of those who were killed in Chicago in 1887". The New York Times described the 1936 demonstration as a commemoration of "the death of the martyrs in Chicago"

Some baseball players who might fall agonizingly-short of reaching 10 years in the big leagues and securing their full pension

This is kinda painful. The 10-year threshold is reached at 9.172 days of major-league service. Pineda and Archer in particular are just days away from full pensions. https://t.co/kgzB6CjS02

— Lindsey Adler (@lindseyadler) April 12, 2023

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

The tangible benefits for reaching 10 years in the majors are significant, even for someone such as Cain who signed a lucrative free-agent deal. When a player reaches 10 years of service, he becomes fully vested in the MLB Players Association pension. It guaranteed a minimum of $68,000 a year for retired players and up to $220,000 if they wait until they’re 62.

A paper arguing that gig companies like Uber use "algorithmic wage discrimination" to string along workers with just enough work and just enough to pay to keep them working

LAT:

In most cases, workers are given only two choices for each job they’re offered on a platform — accept or decline — and they have no power to negotiate their rates. With the asymmetric information advantage all on their side, companies are able to use the data they’ve gathered to “calculate the exact wage rates necessary to incentivize desired behaviors.”

One of those desired behaviors is staying on the road as long as possible, so workers might be available to meet the always-fluctuating levels of demand. As such, Dubal writes, the companies are motivated “to elongate the time between sending fares to any one driver” — just as long as they don’t get so impatient waiting for a ride they end their shift. Remember, Uber drivers are not paid for any time they are not “engaged,” which is often as much as 40% of a shift, and they have no say in when they get offered rides, either. “The company’s machine-learning technologies may even predict the amount of time a specific driver is willing to wait for a fare,” Dubal writes.

If the algorithm can predict that one worker in the region with a higher acceptance rate will take that sushi delivery for $4 instead of $5 — they’ve been waiting for what seems like forever at this point — it may, according to the research, offer them a lower rate. If the algorithm can predict that a given worker will keep going until he or she hits a daily goal of $200, Dubal says, it might lower rates on offer, making that goal harder to hit, to keep them working longer.